Hot Cheetos and Takis

The first thing you'll notice is that this video is visually and aurally authentic.  The corner store location provides the urban backdrop for shaky cam cuts of the crew while the beat, I dunno, sounds like it came out of a machine that makes beats for popular BET artists. The second thing you'll notice is that street fashion evidentially doesn't change between ages ten to thirty. So it looks real.   But as we must always ask of reality, "really?"

It's kids, doing rap.  Rappin' 'bout snacks as they are want to do, specifically by brand name.  As evinced by multiple locations, post-editing, and cornucopia of snacks, this is video was not paid for by the screen talent.  It likely was paid for by someone who saw it as an investment.  And who stands the most to gain from some talented kids showcasing their products?

Hot Cheetos
Takis
Lemonade Brisk
Elmo
Orange Fanta
Fritos
Skittles
Starburst
Doritos

I've taken the pleasure of tracking these products up the company chain, to see which, if any are competitors.  Fritos, Doritos, and Cheetos are all created by Frito-Lay.  Frito-Lay is owned by PepsiCo.

Brisk tea is a Lipton co-creation with PepsiCo, but Lipton is owned by Unilever.  I think if you buy a Brisk tea PepsiCo makes the profit, but if you buy a box of Lipton tea Unilever does.

Takis are evidently corn flour fried rolls made in Mexico and distributed in the US.  They are the beloved and palatable creation of Grupo Bimbo.  As they say, "This industrialization of Mexico’s gastronomy has been characteristic of Grupo Biimbo." 

Fanta is a Coke brand.

Skittles and Starburst are a Wrigley brand, and Wrigley is a subsidiary for Mars.

Elmo is a Sesame Street character, which is intellectual property owned by Disney.

Now that I've sat through 10 minutes of website flash intros for our mutual edification, back to the mission at hand.  All these products are mentioned in the lyrics, but they aren't all brands from the same company.  A company attempting to use online conversations to virally market has probably learned by 2012 that you can't control the conversation completely, so perhaps this mix of brands demonstrates a savvy to not to transparently exclude the competitor; they're mostly Pepsi brands.  But still, it's less than half the same company, so we can probably rule out that this is corporate marketing.

That's not to say it's not marketing though.  Many companies, Doritos for instance, offer contests for user-submitted content which advertise their product.  We may recall a particularly egregious example from a couple years ago, the awful Four Loko song which thematically matched Four Loko's awfulness by infusing insipid choreography with faux hoodery.  It's not hard to imagine Hot Cheetos and Takis was made to submit for a prize.

But Hot Cheetos and Takis is not shitty like the Four Loko song.  It's well done.  Make no mistake, it's disturbing--like, I want at least 4 bars addressing childhood obesity or diabetes--but a well made package musically and visually.  The question is who paid the production team?  It might perfectly capture the expression of childhood as one writer has said, but Ben 10 and Fizzy Fee didn't rent professional grade cameras or pay for studio time with their allowance. If we take them at their words, they spend their money exclusvely on snacks and nobody can stop them. One's mom even hit the ATM because she know he need them. Who would enlist a crew of corn-addicted tweens to write an anthem to snacks?

According to this Is It Satire?-spoiling expose at Grantland, the kids are part of a Beats and Rhymes afterschool program. They are part of a young rap group (collective?) called YN Rich Kids, which with different members than those neccesarily featured in the video, have produced eight albums. So to answer the question, who pays? If it's an after school program, probably a combination of the state and the parents. Meaning, 1) this video could become part of a political squabble in the near future as conservatives ask “should public funds be going to the black arts?” (or Joe Biden, accidentally) and 2) this is the St. Paul, Minnesota version of Rebecca Black's Friday, where the indulgent parental vanity is replaced by youthful exuberance.

The video is H-O-T like a bag of some hot Cheetos,
Lets hope the inevitable PepsiCo co-optation is mutually beneficial/